Is there a way to get Blender display the nodes and edges of the national_trade_graph.x3d?
Blender defaults show a Cube along with a Camera object and a basic Lamp. This allows a first time user to immediately render a scene.

The most common instructions in Blender tutorials are to Delete this Cube so you can get on and do your own work.

Select the Cube with a Right mouse click (current Blender version 2.79b, changes in 2.8 to a Left click) and press delete and confirm to remove the Cube from the Scene.

From the File menu select Import and X3D Extensible 3D(.x3d,.wrl).


Select your file and press the Import X3D/VRML2 button.



After a short while your model and all its components are loaded and visible.

All the components making up the diagram are now listed in the Outliner and it is worth learning how to use the Select Pattern function.

Press a to deselect everything and then Click the Select menu and Select Pattern ...

In the Select Pattern dialog change the Pattern from &ast; to Shape_Text*



This will select all the Text elements and you can now move them with g(Grab) and y along the Y axis. Which allows you to nicely move the Text into the foreground or background.